Bears and Other Predators Invade U.S. Neighborhoods

As once-threatened animal populations including black bears, mountain lions and alligators rebound and people move into former wildlands, predators are showing up precisely where they don't belong: in backyards. And the wildlife isn't as afraid of us as we might think. Welcome to the food chain.

It was the perfect ending to a perfect afternoon. Gary Mann and his girlfriend Helen were watching the sun go down after a satisfying day clearing brush in the backyard of Mann's home in Sutter Creek, Calif. A pile of branches and twigs was burning merrily, throwing shadows into the growing darkness as the couple's three dogs--a 50-pound Shar-Pei named Tigger and a pair of Rottweiler mixes, Takota and Tenaya--played at their feet.

Mann's home is the kind of place nature lovers dream of. The house is set back from the road on a densely wooded, 10-acre parcel bordered by government land and private property; wild turkeys and deer--up to a dozen at a time--wander through daily. Beyond the backyard lawn, 80 feet from the house, ponderosa and oak grow thickly on the steep slopes of a hill.

That February night, Helen heard crackling and snapping of underbrush and saw something large moving along the edge of the trees. When Tigger went to investigate, with Takota close behind, Mann didn't stop them, even though he knew mountain lions roamed the area. One had peered through his neighbor's window, scaring the woman inside, and another neighbor had recently seen a big male lion in Mann's driveway. "The lions come in pretty far," Mann says. "Common sense would have said, don't let the dogs go. But I've been living up here for eight years, and it's rare that they attack dogs."

Suddenly, the couple heard Tigger "screaming for her life," Mann says. When he ran down to the edge of the woods, he could only see shadows and fleeting movement in the thick underbrush. Whatever was attacking the Shar-Pei growled at him. Takota rushed in, and then it was over--the animal released Tigger and took off. "We think Takota scared it," Mann says. "It all happened in about 10 seconds."

Tigger's injuries were serious. The skin over her head had been split open to the bone, her left eye almost torn out. Deep claw marks ran down her back. Mann held the wounds closed as he and Helen rushed Tigger to the vet, who confirmed that the injuries had been caused by a mountain lion.

Tigger survived, but since the incident Mann has kept the dogs out of the woods. "I'm still here and the lion is still here," he says. "My neighbors said it was up at their property two nights ago. To attack a dog near a house when two adults are out in the yard with a fire going--that's when you have to start worrying. There are lots of kids just a couple of blocks from here."

When Europeans settled the New World, they dealt with predators by showing them the business end of a gun. Wherever pioneers settled, populations of large predators--mountain lions, bears, wolves, alligators--plummeted or disappeared entirely. That search-and-destroy mission continued virtually unabated until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s, when the national attitude began to evolve. People came to believe that what was left of wilderness and its inhabitants should be preserved for future generations.

This ideology has clearly worked: Since the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, 14 species of animals that were on the brink of extinction have recovered. Alligators were removed from the list in 1987; gray wolves in 2009. The grizzly bear, confined mostly to Yellowstone National Park in the lower 48 states, was delisted in 2007. As for once heavily hunted mountain lions, some 50,000 of the big cats now inhabit North America, with populations in the United States as far east as North Dakota. Experts predict that lions eventually will reinhabit the Adirondacks in New York, the Maine woods and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Few people anticipated that rebounding populations would create a new problem: an increase in animal attacks as predators returned to former ranges now occupied by humans. In August 2002, a black bear killed a 5-month-old girl in the Catskills, a hundred miles northwest of New York City; the baby had been sleeping in a carriage on the porch. In January 2004, a mountain lion killed a male bicyclist in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif., then attacked a 31-year-old woman a few hours later. Other bicyclists managed to save the victim, but not before she sustained serious injuries. In October 2007, an alligator snatched and killed an 83-year-old woman outside her daughter's home in Savannah, Ga. The next day, her body was found in a pond, hands and a foot missing. And, in May 2008, a coyote bit a 2-year-old girl playing in a Chino Hills, Calif., park and attempted to drag her off.

Though the trend is worrisome, the absolute number of attacks remains small. Fatal black bear attacks on humans have doubled since the late 1970s, increasing from one to just two incidents per year. (About six people are injured each year.) Between 1890 and 2008, there were 110 mountain lion attacks in North America; half of the 20 fatalities resulting from these attacks occurred in the past two decades. Despite an alligator population too large to count, the U.S. had just 391 attacks and 18 fatalities between 1948 and 2005. Coyotes have caused only one known fatality in the U.S.

Still, the relationship between animals and humans is proving to be more complex than simply kill 'em all or love 'em all--even though some of the old, romantic ideas about living at one with nature linger. "If you ask people why they moved where they did, you discover that they moved to be immersed in nature and wildlife," says Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "The fastest way to decrease the experience is to start killing the animals."

Whether homeowners welcome large animals into their neighborhoods or see them as life-threatening intruders, most people recognize that we've entered a new era: Predators and humans today often share the same terrain, and their daily routines intersect in ways that challenge conventional ideas about man and nature.

The carefully manicured lawns of suburban and exurban developments may look domesticated, but they often occupy what were recently wildlands. These transitional zones between habitats, known as ecotones, are expanding at an unprecedented rate--providing more opportunities for human-predator interaction. Urban land area in the U.S. has quadrupled from 15 million acres in 1945 to 60 million in 2002; rural residential land has increased by an average of 1.2 million acres per year since 1980.

But the spread of human populations doesn't necessarily come at the expense of predators. The semiwild environments desired by humans are often equally attractive to apex animals, and in many regions, human and predator populations are growing hand-in-hand. Nowhere is this more evident than in America's gator belt, which extends from North Carolina down through Florida and west to Louisiana and Texas. There, people have moved into the wetlands where alligators live, and they've created ponds and canals within subdivisions that alligators consider appealing habitats.

In July 2008, 11-year-old Devin Funck and two friends escaped the stifling Louisiana heat by taking a dip in Crystal Lake, a flooded former gravel pit in a subdivision near Slidell. Funck was playing in the shallows when an alligator grabbed his arm, dragged him to deeper water and pulled him under. After a struggle, Funck poked the gator in the eye and pulled free, but his left arm was gone, torn off at the shoulder. Friends ran for help, and within an hour emergency responders were rushing the boy to hospital.

According to local news reports, area residents knew the gator lived in the popular swimming hole; in fact, they had even given the 10-foot 8-inch, 500-pound reptile a name--Big Joe. It took nearly 3 hours for hunters to find and kill Big Joe and cut Funck's bluish but intact arm from its stomach. Doctors were unable to reattach the limb, however, and Devin now wears a prosthesis.

Experts can offer no explanation as to why the gator, which had patrolled Crystal Lake for years without incident, attacked Funck. And neither can residents: Two boys who often swam in the lake said that the alligators there usually swim away when approached. "The set of circumstances that takes a human-alligator interaction to the next step, to an attack--we don't know what that trigger is," says University of Florida professor and gator expert Frank Mazzotti.

As animals and people encounter each other more frequently, creatures can lose their sense of fear. It's called habituation--a process by which an animal, after a period of exposure to a stimulus, stops responding. "Through experience, animals learn that people or developments are not threats, so their natural fear decreases," says Tania Lewis, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

When animals are no longer afraid of humans, they no longer try to avoid them--and the results can be deadly. In January 1991, 18-year-old Scott Lancaster was killed--and partially eaten--by a mountain lion as he jogged a quarter-mile from his Idaho Springs, Colo., high school. This case and other human-lion interactions in and around Boulder, Colo., were the basis of the book The Beast in the Garden, in which author David Baron argues that mountain lions have become habituated. "As wildlife invades suburbs," Baron wrote, "and as suburbs invade wildlife habitat, we are changing animal behavior in unexpected and sometimes troubling ways. Rarely has the behavioral shift been so well documented, as in the case of Boulder's lions." The lions, he argues, weren't afraid of people; in fact, the cats had changed their diets to include pets and sometimes people--and were teaching their offspring to do the same.

University of Northern Arizona professor Paul Beier scoffs at the idea of species-wide mountain lion habituation--as well as the notion that people are now lion prey. "It's just not true," he says. "If people were on the menu, we'd have an attack every day." Though habituation can occur in individual animals, "The idea that it's happening broadly as a phenomenon is not consistent with the number of attacks we see, which is still less than one fatality a year. Every mountain lion has had an opportunity to kill a human, so 99.9 percent of mountain lions don't bother to chomp us."

Beier, who keeps records of mountain lion attacks and has tagged and tracked 32 lions, says all predators experiment with different types of prey. "They have prey that they specialize in eating, but occasionally they'll eat something else--that's how they learn," he says. "If you think about it, that's necessary for animals to evolve. Maybe they're trying something new that's about the size of a deer but has two legs. But, by and large, they don't."

Even if humans don't turn into prey for all predators, the USGS's Lewis--whose husband was Scott Lancaster's classmate--believes habituation does happen, and not just for mountain lions, but for bears, coyotes, alligators and most other animals that regularly come into contact with humans. "Wildlife will habituate," she says. "We have an effect on each other--whenever people and animals encounter each other, animals learn from that, and that helps shape their behavior the next time they have an encounter."

When summer rolls around, our backyards turn into a smorgasbord for wildlife. Uncleaned grills, bird feeders, dog food left on the porch and garbage stuffed into unsecured bins can lure creatures to our doorsteps. And once an animal has an easily obtained meal, it keeps coming back. The process through which animals learn that people are a source of high-quality calories is called food conditioning. "Sometimes wild animals get accustomed to a certain source of food, and they forgo other sources," Bekoff says. "Why hunt for a rabbit when you can get a freebie handout at Joe's?"

This was just the kind of situation Denise Haldeman walked right into in May 2008. She went outside after dark to take down the bird feeders in the backyard of her Barbours, Pa., home. Her dog, Panda, tore into the darkness, but Haldeman thought the 12-year-old Lab mix was chasing another dog that sometimes ran loose in the neighborhood.

Then she saw the black bear. It was standing on its hind legs, just a few feet away, clicking its teeth. As Haldeman turned to flee, the bear struck her from behind, knocking her facedown on the patio. "The bear was standing on me, biting my head," Haldeman later told reporters.

The bear left without attacking her further. Haldeman was treated for wounds on her head, face, arms and legs. Panda was not so lucky; the dog, which had also encountered the bear, died from its injuries. Authorities later determined that Haldeman had unwittingly come between a sow and her cubs; 10 days later the bears, which had previously been seen around the neighborhood, were trapped in Haldeman's yard and relocated about 150 miles away.

Black bears, usually considered far more docile than grizzlies, will typically flee when confronted by a human, says Stephen Herrero, author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. He has been studying bear attacks for 42 years. Food-conditioned black bears can become aggressive--a learned behavior from the wild, where they must defend their food from other bears.

Most attacks are defensive--when people are in a bear's space, it feels uncomfortable and may attack the perceived threat. But some attacks are predatory. "There's the odd black bear--and this is where the fatalities come from--that just decides, Well, I've been eating deer all my life, I think I'll try out that two-legged thing," Herrero says. "That pattern of behavior is very recognizable. The bear walks around, sizes things up, and when it decides to go for it, it goes for it." But most predatory attacks take place in the wilderness. Herrero says that backyard predatory behavior is peculiar, and biologists haven't yet figured out why it's happening.

Though bears are the poster children for food conditioning, they are by no means the only susceptible animals. "Coyotes that have become problems have been fed," Bekoff says. "It's hard to think of any exceptions." In August 1981, a 3-year-old girl from Glendale, Calif., was waiting in the driveway for her father to find his car keys when a coyote grabbed her by the throat. Before the father could chase the animal away, it dragged the toddler through the street; she later died of a broken neck and blood loss. Bekoff, who worked the case, says the neighbors had been feeding the coyote, perhaps in hopes that regular meals would prevent the wild animal from attacking pets. Wolves, raccoons and even alligators can also become food-conditioned.

Humanity isn't likely to stop expanding into wildlife habitat. Though the risk of a fatal animal attack--or any animal attack--is less than the chance of getting struck by lightning (1 in 400,000), every time we step in the water in Florida, or jog alone in mountain lion territory, we are at risk. So how can we successfully live in this deceptively tame-looking new wilderness?

Most biologists argue that the simplest solution--eradicating predators--would be counterproductive. "If you kill animals, other animals come in," Bekoff says, pointing out that wolves once kept coyote populations in check, and without that natural predator, coyote populations have exploded. Besides, Bekoff says, "people are against the wanton killing of these animals."

The key, then, might be to adapt ourselves. "We live with wildlife, and when we choose to build our house in the middle of the forest, we've now put our house in their backyard," says Charles Schwartz, a research wildlife biologist at Montana State University. Predators once roamed the land unchallenged, yet if we're smart--giving animals the respect they deserve and reconsidering how we dispose of garbage, what foliage we plant--we can live together.

"They're wild animals, and they're predators," Mazzotti says. "Treating them with that small amount of respect and intelligence is the best thing we can do to live with them."